Sitting between Fights

Is having people wait for focus and health between fights a good idea? Is the regeneration out of combat too slow?

Just finally been able to jump in and play a bit again and it's a pretty boring aspect of adventuring. Fight Wolf for 30 seconds, sit down and do nothing for 30 seconds. Repeat.

What I would like to know is what is the actual purpose of this system? Because my pro/con list is currently looking like this:

Pros
- Prevents carpal tunnel

Cons
- Creates downtime from actual gameplay
- Long, repeated periods of literally doing nothing is not engaging
- The rest period encourages me to just auto attack and simply use focus for heals
- It makes my limited free time feel wasted when 50% of the game is just sitting around in a forest

 

The fact that creatures can be killed in less than 30 seconds is quite weird tbh , I'd like to see longer fights instead of long grinding sessions killing mobs, with waiting times between fights.

 

Yeah, if it's a time thing, I would much prefer it if fights were twice as long with very fast out of combat regen. Same progression time, but I'd be doing more.

 

what skill lvl are you i generally at lvl 52 ish haven't checked recently after combat hit z. loot mob run to new mob and by the time i engage im full health and full mana. so i think it might get better at higher lvls or could be just need to spend some skill points in mana and healthy

i do remember early on that i had the same problem. but cant honestly say that its a lvl thing or skill investment points that has created the situation where i am now where i dont worry about it.

 

Regen is too fast.

We shouldn't have the problem of waiting for the next fight to begin with, because the regen should be slow enough that you shouldn't depend on it. That's what healing potions should be for.

 

So, you would prefer a system where you need to drink 2-3 potions after each fight to restore health and focus? May I ask why you feel that would benefit the game?

I am low level. I imagine if I levelled the Focus and Healthy skill the situation would improve. This is also why I despise the Focus skill and focus cost reduction skills. It makes Focus horrible at the start and far easier at the end. It's meant to be a resource you need to manage throughout the game. Instead it feels more like mana in WoW. Hard at first and then later you can just forget you have a mana bar at all. I would much prefer a fixed max focus and costs with stacking, combos (not just literal combos, but using abilities in certain conditions) and timing to play the main role in focus management rather than how many points are put in it. Overall I'd rather see it regenerate quite quickly, but have higher base costs on abilities.

For example, a max of 100 focus with an ability like Thrust costing 25. If you use Thrust while the target is bleeding, it refunds 10 of the cost. Focus regenerates at about 5 per second. Management without the downtime, more reason to combo abilities and focus remains as meaningful from level 1 to 100.

I do not see the benefit in having it cripple people who are new to the game. The only thing it achieved was boring me to death with downtime. Though I worry that people see Grinding & Boredom as being the same as Progression. I would prefer to progress by doing fun things instead, but "Fun" is often considered synonymous with "Casual", as if enjoying the game is a sort of cop-out.

 

Why would you need 2-3 potions to restore health? Players should have defensive skills they can use, in addition to relying on defensive behavior, to cut down the amount of damage they're taking. Combat should work in a way that healing isn't always necessary, because combat isn't a DPS war.

At any rate, in the bigger picture. I'd prefer it work like it always did in the single player Ultima games. Those never had auto-heal. You cast Heal spells, drank potions, or visited a healer. They were great games, fun games, not grindfests. I'd rather the game move to where the expectation for combat isn't a grindfest.

 

Except if I use my defensive abilities I sit down and wait 30 seconds for focus, not health.

In ultima online, if you were a mage, you restored about 10 mana per second with meditation, so "focus" was not an issue to wait for and two heals would fix you up. Downtime? about 5 seconds.

As a warrior you used one of your 200 bandages that cost you about 100 gold and didn't even worry about a secondary resource. Total downtime? 3-7 seconds depending on hp and if you'd already been healing when the fight ended.

In UO bandages and spells were the equivalent of just pressing a Rest button that put you back at full in ~5 seconds and had no real associated cost. If my warrior in SotA could pick up bandages so I could heal to full in 5 seconds after combat and his abilities had no focus cost, I'd be in UO territory.

 

Yea, bandages in UO were a cheat button.

I would rather emulate single player Ultimas than UO on combat. And there's nothing wrong with doing something other than moving from one grind to another, as far as waiting and combat goes.

 

But Heal in UO was also a cheat button. Mages never ran out of mana for Heal and it restored ~20 health per cast. My point was just that in UO, there was no real cost to fully restoring your health out of combat and their version of Focus regenerated very fast (and was only used by Mages).

My issue with the Focus tree in this game is everyone needs it, so why make it a skill as if it's an option? Either make focus less important for certain paths so there are people who would not level it or just normalize the Focus resource and don't have it as a skill.

What do you mean by "nothing wrong with doing something other than moving from one grind to another"?

My scenario is I am low level, waiting ages between each fight. I need to kill things to gain skill and money to progress. I do not have money for potions. My focus does not regenerate very fast (much slower than health) and so I wait 30 second between each fight, at least. I am aware this gets easier as I level, but from the view of someone who is low level, the first impression is "oh dear lord, I am so bored, why am I sat in an imaginary field waiting to play the game I'm supposed to already be playing?"

In my eyes this isn't what you want someone to be thinking after just buying your game.

Not to even mention the fact that new players currently need to know to go to Kingsport to reach the easier areas. Bet a lot of them are loving the much harder wolves and bandits next to the current starting area.

 

Wow, I find the regen of monsters to be comical. I find the healing powers of players to be equally disturbing. I often find myself wondering who could possibly be enjoying any aspect of this combat system because of these two things.

The idea that somehow we should just be fighting non-stop perpetually gaining experience because we're killing the same things over and over again is just not how I want this game to behave.

I guess all I can hope for is that I win the lottery and take over game development so there's something new and challenging to do in this game that involves combat.

 

But its exactly how a lot of single player games work, including the older Ultimas, but also many that are made today. People buy those games, play them, and don't get frustrated.

By 'moving from one grind to another' what I'm talking about is making combat nothing other than a simple exercise of farming monsters for XP and gold, which is kind of like a mindless job, and which is why its called grinding -- like you would grind for a job. You never have to worry about your health, since you have easy healing, or will res at the start of a scene. Monsters are there waiting for you to kill them, and they respawn shortly after you kill them, so you have more monsters to kill, and you can do that in an endless cycle. Wash, rinse, and repeat. A repetitive grind.

Whereas, on the other hand, combat in the game could be made something interesting and fun in its own right. It would be something you don't always want to do, something that requires tactics to do, and something that's a bit more complex than going through a grind routine. And then hiding from monsters while you try to regain focus might fit into that fun, too. Imagine that you just defeated one skeleton, and are hiding around the corner catching your breath, hoping another won't notice you before you're ready to fight him.

The point would be to bring some imagination, some role-playing, back into combat.

Its possible that we're just expecting different kinds of games here, but, yea, as I've said, I'd like something closer to a single-player experience.

 

I'm not frustrated, I'm bored. Which modern day games are you referring to that force you to watch your health/energy bar tick up for 30 seconds between every fight?

As for the grind. The idea of combat should be that it's fun. If the combat feels like a grind, that wouldn't be a result of reduced downtime, that would just be boring combat mechanics.

In terms of an RP context, what is the difference between roleplaying the situation described above (hiding from a skeleton) with 100% hp/focus and 10%? And by the same token, now consider the difference of wanting to actually fight with 100% or 10%. One situation is completely viable in both scenarios, the other isn't, unless the idea is that this downtime is "forced roleplay time".

In the case of hiding and tactics, I would like to do this because the enemy is smart and every fight is a challenge, not because my health bar and focus bar are low.

 

We need a meditation skill. We need focus regen benefits for wearing cloth.

 

hey i still want my band-aids im still pist that one a avatar i play i used almost no magery at all.... im in full plate and the only two mage spells i have is heal and fire fist. yet i had to waste a ton of points on mana crap just cause all the weapon skills require mana.

 

passive stance?

 

I'm not. I'm referring to games where you can wait forever and you won't auto-heal, or the auto-heal is too slow, you're not going to wait for it. You're also not going to need it between every fight, unless you completely get to a state of total injury and complete exhaustion, which shouldn't happen, either.

Though there are some where you have to wait to auto-heal too.

Because you might be ready to fight with 100%. You could also choose to run and escape from the skeleton too, because moving on and fighting new skeletons endlessly isn't necessarily the goal of playing the game. Or you can choose to fight differently, to preserve your health or focus so you don't deplete it. Because depleting to 10% shouldn't be the necessary result of every combat.

 

Meditation should be a skill of it's own. Stances are for warriors not mages.

 

It would be redundant, though. It would make sense if mana was separate from stamina, but they chose not to do that. I think passive stance was mainly created for mages.

 

Sheesh that is a mess then, I never use stances with a mage hehe...